What if you could read the DNA of your future child? | Noor Siddiqui

Orchid, founded by Noor Siddiqui, sequences all three billion DNA bases in IVF embryos, aiming to identify inherited disease risks that chromosome-focused testing can miss. Siddiqui says standard chromosome testing checks whether chromosomes are present but may not detect genetic typos within them. Orchid’s screening, she says, can assess risk for about 3,000 genetic diseases, using information across the genome rather than looking only for chromosome abnormalities.

The process starts with a small sample: in a typical IVF round, Siddiqui says, there are about five to 15 embryos, and an embryologist sends Orchid five cells, containing roughly 30 picograms of DNA. Orchid developed a way to amplify that material without corrupting it. Siddiqui says embryo test results have matched results from the babies later born. That claim supports her case for sequencing embryos before implantation, though the synopsis does not specify how many such comparisons have been made.

Orchid combines sequence data with medical records from hundreds of thousands of people to build models estimating disease risk for each embryo. The models assess the cumulative effects of millions of genetic variants, according to Siddiqui. She says screening a set of five embryos can reduce disease risk by 30% to 50%. These are risk estimates across a group of embryos, not a guarantee that a selected embryo will or will not develop a condition; the potential benefit depends on having embryos to compare and on the models’ ability to estimate risk.

Siddiqui contrasts Orchid’s approach with carrier screening and noninvasive prenatal testing, which she says examine less than 1% of the genome and therefore have limited ability to identify many of the diseases Orchid screens for. She points to families affected by serious conditions: Mia has lissencephaly, while Lydia’s neurodevelopmental disorder was caused by a single base-pair mutation in KCNQ2. Their families used Orchid to screen embryos for later pregnancies; in Lydia’s case, the later child was Lucy. The examples illustrate the appeal of identifying a known disease risk before pregnancy, while also showing how the technology can be used in response to a family’s specific experience.

Siddiqui says her mother’s progressive blindness motivated her to found Orchid and give prospective parents more genetic information. She cites a gene therapy for her mother’s retinitis pigmentosa that costs a million dollars per eye, arguing that embryo screening is affordable relative to the costs of genetic disease. She also says 400 million people worldwide have a genetic disease, half of them children, and that 95% of affected people lack an FDA-approved treatment. Those figures frame her argument that prevention and risk reduction matter where treatment options are limited, but they do not establish what screening can prevent for any individual family.

Siddiqui predicts that larger datasets will strengthen Orchid’s risk models, enabling parents to reduce more risk with fewer embryos, and says embryo screening will soon become the default way people have babies. Elise Hu raises unresolved questions about ethics and access. An audience member asks whether the technology gives wealthier families an advantage and where society should draw the line on genetic selection or CRISPR. Siddiqui says these are societal questions that require discussion as the technology advances quickly; the episode presents no settled boundary or answer.